Microsoft today announced that it is making it easier for developers to use its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) to build their own deep learning applications. The company first open sourced this toolkit in April 2015, but at the time, it was hosted on Microsoft’s own CodePlex site and was only available under a restrictive academic license. Now, the team is moving the project to GitHub and to the MIT open source license.While Microsoft’s old license made the project accessible to academics, it wasn’t really geared toward production usage and tinkering outside of the academic environment. With this new license — and by having the project on GitHub — Microsoft hopes to attract other users as well. As Microsoft’s chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang notes in today’s announcement, CNTK is highly optimized for speed. “The CNTK toolkit is just…